The Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion at Metropolitan Museum on artrepublic.com

The exhibition features approximately 80 masterworks of haute couture and ready-to-wear. Fashion editorial, advertising, and runway photography plus largescale projections from feature films are used throughout the galleries to contextualize the fashion zeitgeist.

The exhibition explores how models transmit cultural change via photographs that document turning points in society and design. With the post-WWII resurgence of the American fashion and advertising industries, the launch of Dior’s New Look and a proliferation of model agencies, an environment in which high-fashion models with celebrated personalities and distinctive identities emerged. Lisa Fonssagrives, Dovima, Suzy Parker, Sunny Harnett, and Dorian Leigh personified this Golden Age of Haute Couture. Photographers such as Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, and Cecil Beaton portrayed the new ideal of feminine artifice. Daywear from Christian Dior and eveningwear from Charles James evoke the mood of the time, and in some cases, recreate scenes from important photographs.

A large gallery inspired by William Klein’s 1966 film Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo? evokes the Sixties “Youthquake” with Bernard and François Baschet’s metallic dresses from the movie and ensembles from Paco Rabanne, Pierre Cardin, André Courrèges, and Rudi Gernreich, designers who heralded the transformation from a sophisticated to a youthful ideal with Jean Shrimpton, Peggy Moffitt, Veruschka, and Twiggy. The next gallery focuses on the 1970s, when athletic, All-American models such as Lisa Taylor and Jerry Hall enlivened the simple, unstructured goddess dresses of Halston, and an emerging group of ethnic beauties like Mouniaand Kirat presented the haute bohemian looks of Yves Saint Laurent.

In the 1980s, supermodels expressed an idealized glamour, dissolving boundariesbetween runway, editorial, and advertising work. Naomi Campbell, LindaEvangelista, and Christy Turlington emerged as the “Trinity” appearing in globalcampaigns for designer brands seeking to bolster their identities. These modelscould morph into a different persona at each photo shoot, and still manage toconvey their priceless, individual distinction.

By the 1990s, grunge and street style led to a radical shift from glamorous beauty to the rebel chic of Kate Moss, much as Twiggy supplanted Jean Shrimpton in the ’60s. The exhibition’s presentation of the minimalism of Donna Karan, Helmut Lang, and Prada that immediately followed shows how models of this era became an anonymous cadre of replicated perfection, allowing the clothing to supersede all. A coda to the exhibition features the Richard Prince and Marc Jacobs collaboration of masked, anonymous nurses (Stephanie Seymour and Natalia Vodianova) in Louis Vuitton, versus selections from John Galliano’s 2007 supermodel-fueled runway show in Versailles for the 60th anniversary of Christian Dior.

OPENING HOURS: Fri & Sat: 09.30 – 22.00, Sun, Tue–Thur 09.30 - 17.30

Image Credits:

Slide Show:

Twiggy in dress, spring/summer 1967, by Yves Saint Laurent (French, 1936-2008, Vogue, March 15, 1967, Photograph by Bert Stern (American, born 1929), Photograph by Bert Stern/Courtesy Staley-Wise Gallery, New York

Veruschka in safari suit, 1968, by Yves Saint Laurent (French, 1936-2008French Vogue, August, 1968, Photograph by Franco Rubartelli (Italian, born 1937), Photograph courtesy of Rubartelli – Vogue France

Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Tatjana Patitz, Christy Turlington, and Cindy Crawford in tops, 1990, by Giorgio di Sant’Angelo (American, bornItaly, 1933-1989), British Vogue, January 1990, Photograph by Peter Lindbergh (German, born 1944), Photograph courtesy of Peter Lindbergh7.